The work is part of a project inaugurated in 2014 at the Maramotti Collection entitled Portrait of women which put the artists Alessandra Ariatti and Chantal Joffe in dialogue: both have concentrated their artistic research in portraits, a figural tradition that has been continuously traversed Western art (but not only) from the fifteenth century to today. The portrait, as an investigation of the interiority, as well as of the features, of a person or character, dates back, even before the modern era, to Greek and Roman marble portraits; while adapting to the evolution of styles and forms, it has always maintained the historical need to bear witness to instances of social cohesion or dissociation. The portraits of these artists are anchored on the one hand to the aesthetics, or rather to culture, of contemporary art and on the other, perhaps even more intimately than for the artists of the past, to the 'milieu' in which they live and work. Their formal connection, however, ends here. Ariatti paints groups of figures that have a hyper-photographic precision, functional to the possibility of probing their psychological depth and the intensity of human interrelation. The artist focuses essentially on the faces and the accentuation of their formation in a mini-social nucleus, underlined by the general title he gave to his group of works: "Bonds". What interests her, in the practice of her painting, is the possibility of highlighting a relationship between the subjects of the works and the artist and of generating a dialogue with the viewer. Stylistically Ariatti aspires to the hard-edged intensity of Renaissance saints and has invested four full years of his work in portraying the three families featured in this project.